View  Info

Podcast 048


Intro, advertising


Spolsky: Well no, it's the M-Audio people they're electical engineers that they've assigned to the task of programming did not sufficiently read the documentation on USB and they implemented the lame form of USB where the device doesn't uniquely identify itself.

Atwood: Right.





Atwood: Why is this dirty laundry?

Spolsky: Well, I'm about to air dirty laundry in public.

Atwood: Ok, go ahead.


Atwood: Yes




Spolsky: OK [laughing]

Atwood: It could always be more obvious.


Atwood: The ironic thing, he didn't actually copy...



Spolsky: Yeah.





Atwood: Yes, I just don't want there to be any confusion.  I actually did write the guys and they did respond.  And I think I CC'd you on that or BCC'd you...

Spolsky: Yeah


Spolsky: Yeah, yeah, that's the trademark.

Atwood: We had nothing to do...

Spolsky: That's the trade dress


Spolsky: No I didn't even see that


Spolsky: Are they just translating the things you post?


Spolsky: Which is the only thing they could have had

Atwood: They could have totally copied all the content.  That is completely legal.



Spolsky: Yeah


Spolsky: Yeah


Spolsky: Right


Spolsky: Right, right, right


A & Spolsky: [chuckles]


Spolsky: Yeah, it's like a moldy version...

Atwood: [laughing]  No, it was really perfect.



Spolsky: mmmhmmm


Spolsky: Why not?

Atwood: ..in a reasonable time frame..

Spolsky: I think that's a mistake



Atwood: [jokingly] And Latin

Spolsky: No, uh Swahili.


Spolsky: Well this is a decision that almost every startup makes. I would go so far as to say every startup.  Which is either localization for providing different markets is always second priority and it's not a wrong decision.  It's a decision that everybody makes.  And what happens, just so you know... Look at for example Google or Ebay, these companies launched in the US in English and they tried to localize aggressively but sometimes there was a local fast copy company that just got there faster and took the market.  A good example: Last time I went to New Zealand I noticed there was this website trademe.  And trademe is just an ebay clone.  And I'm almost certain it came out after ebay and the NZ'ers saw eBay and said "Hey, let's try this" and it just didn't work because of the expense of shipping to and from NZ and so they said "Hey, let's make one that's NZ base".  And they built a clone of eBay called TradeMe.  And I didn't research the story, but the way I understand things, eBay tried to buy them.  eBay tried to move into NZ but just couldn't because TradeMe already had critical mass.  That's where the stuff was. That's where the people were. There's this very strong network effect.  You don't want to auction stuff on a site where there's no buyers, and you don't want to try to buy things on a site where there are no sellers.  SO there's just no way to move in as a second auction website.  So eBay basically had no choice if they ever wanted to be in the NZ market, admittedly a small market, other than to buy trademe.  But the price was just too high and I think they gave up.  And it's not just that.  Google has the same story with ... what was it, Baidu?  There was this company they ended up buying 3%.  Because they just got into China too late...

Atwood: Well I don't think those are the same scenario.

Spolsky: I think they are all the same scenario because...

Atwood: Well, you had a long diatribe there and I want to interject... You're talking about selling physical goods..

Spolsky: What? Google!

Atwood: eBay! Your first example was eBay

Spolsky: Ok there's language... don't concentrate on the selling physical goods. Concentrate on the fact that...

Atwood: Ok, searching! Searching is culture dependent.  Programming is more like mathematics in the sense... it's numbers!  You're not going to localize Pi.

Spolsky: Stop!  So you're saying there's no such thing as people that want to talk about programming in the Chinese language?

Atwood: They're going to do the programming in the English keywords because they have to..

Spolsky: That's actually not true!

Atwood: And they're going to have to learn some of it regardless and I agree it's not the entire market.  But I think the focus is we're talking about something...to the extent that programming is like mathematics - you have a common language which is the keywords and the comments stuff like that...  primarily in English.  So there's a limit to how good you can be as a programmer without learning English, in my opinion.  Now that's not to say you can't have local culture that's complementary.

Spolsky: Listen, all of this is true, but this is not realistically the way it works.

Atwood: I don't know... I've read hundreds if not thousands of comments on this topic and all of them basically said the same thing, which was that... you can't really be a good programmer without learning English.

Spolsky: That doesn't matter!  That doesn't mean there isn't a huge community of people whose English is either not strong enough or just prefer to use their local language.  Programmers in China will just go to the Chinese language site if that exists first.  You can sit there and you can "Tut! Tut!" them and say "You must learn English!"  "It is the lingua franca of programming!"

Atwood: But these are the second tier programmers.  This is not our audience..

Spolsky: [mockingly] OHhhhh, they're not good enough for us because they don't speak English well enough.

Atwood: What I'm saying is we can't do all these things at once.

Spolsky: I agree with that.

Atwood: That's what I'm saying.  I'm not saying they suck.  I'm saying we have to serve one audience really well.

Spolsky: Right

Atwood: Rather than doing a bunch of things crappily, let's do one thing really well.  Right?  And you gotta pick your battles.  I don't think that's a battle...

Spolsky: Right, that's what always happens.  The end game just so you know in advance, is that six years from now when we're really big and we've got all this money and we're just trying to expand.  We'll be like "How do we expand?" And the only opportunity there is there's this big gigantic untapped German speaking market of really good programmers that just happen to prefer to read and write their questions in German.  They could speak English if they wanted to, they just don't choose to.  And they're being served by this beautiful stackoverflow clone that has critical mass in Germany.  And we have to either buy it or just give up on ever having that market.  And so you've limited your growth in certain markets.  I've presented the story with regards to language markets, like the Chinese.. I think what they are Chinese German Japanese and Spanish. Those are the four I probably care the most about... just because I know those are audiences where there's a huge amount... I mean if you go into a Japanese bookstore, you will find more programming in there written in Japanese than you will find in an English bookstore in America.  There are ... I don't know if this is numerically true.. I just know statistically when I walked into bookstores in Tokyo they have way more books on programming topics than you can get in English that are written in Japanese.  And there's a lot of English text there but believe me they don't have... In the Tokyo bookstores it is really hard to find an English language programming book. They just buy them in Japanese.  And so those are the markets I'd care about but that's just language markets ... Think about also things like IT... I mean we wanna do IT.. we wanna do a website for system builders.  We might wanna do gamer site or something like that. There's sort of other categories of sites we want to go in... and I think it's pretty important to get there before somebody else's clone SO and does another website that's exactly like this in those spaces.

Atwood: But I think it's an illusion it's going to happen anyway.  The copies that are being made are not really great copies in my opinion.  First of all we continue to evolve the site.  There are tweaks we do ALL the time that are really significant in terms of how the site works and sort of the social rules of how .. like bounty for example.  I don't know that CNProg has any concept of bounty.  I also noticed that CNProg, you have to log in to do anything there.. which misses a huge point that came up in our site was that - we're all about reducing barriers.  We don't make you log in to do stuff. So already they're getting it wrong.  It's kind of like the crappy ipod copies that are all over the market, but there's one ipod.

Spolsky: You're just looking at the first couple of sites that are sprouting up.  Somebody's going to do it right and then we're gonna not be able to get into that market, whatever it is.

Atwood: Well I just think that's fear driven development.  I don't think that that's in fact true. I mean, I think there's just a broad generic...

Spolsky: Somebody's gonna make... look... I'll be you I don't know if it's this Chinese site, but somebody's gonna make a site.  What about Japan?  I'd love for all Japanese programmers to speak English really well but they don't and there's a LOT of programmers in Japan.  It's probably the second or third largest market for programmers and for example we don't have a localized version of FogBugz and we sell almost nothing in Japan because we don't localize. Nothing!  And it is a market that's just as big and just as important.  Not quite as big, but almost as big and almost as important as the English speaking market and let's say localization adds another five or ten percent to the costs of developing your software... 20%?

Atwood: Well this is social software!  How would I even know that the Japanese content was correct?

Spolsky: You don't do this, you hire people who know Japanese! Geoff?! [laughing]

Atwood: My problem is I can't control it.  The content is built by those people.

Spolsky: Yes

Atwood: The whole social software is a mirror of the audience thing...

Spolsky: Correct

Atwood: I don't know. I just .. it's not the same thing.  You're treating it like a copy of Word.  "Well you just localize Word and then you sell it."  What if in that culture the model doesn't work?

Spolsky: What if it does?

Atwood: I mean it's social software.  Thats the other risk there.  YOu have to think about the audience.

Spolsky: Yes?

Atwood: And since I'm not Japanese I don't know the audience at all..

Spolsky: I would never have you do the Japanese version.  The way to do the Japanese version is to find somebody who really knows the Japanese developer market and knows Japanese developer mentality and knows American developer mentality and knows how to translate these things and knows what features you might have to add and what features you might have to remove and does a really good localized version.  If you look at the Japanese version of MS WOrd, it's not just a translation of the strings.  There's all kinds of ability to make little greeting cards in there that are ... and they have these long snippets because there are these long formal phrases you always include in Japanese letters so Word has all these features to handle this.  So you do add another small number of features which are necessary to make the product truly native.

Atwood: Right.

Spolsky: Yeah, you would have to hire professionals or get local partners, but all I'm really saying here is that it is extremely common... First of all I think your logical argument that everybody should just learn English or should know English, or that first class vs. second class developers or that English as the lingua franca... that's totally true, but not really relevant because I guarantee you just walk into that bookstore... Where was I?  Oh yeah, Germany, I was in Germany.  There's a bookstore right by the museum in Munich... the modern art museum, like two blocks away from that, that is just a programming books bookstore.  And it's like a whole...

Atwood: I can't believe we're... these are dead tree books?

Spolsky: Yes

Atwood: You're telling me the future is dead tree books?

Spolsky: All I'm telling you is if you walk into that bookstore, every book is in German, and there's no ... there might be a bookstore with programming books in Silicon Valley, but this is an entire bookstore of dead tree books that are all in German.  And that means that the local audience of programmers, and they speak *beautiful* English in Germany, and they STILL prefer to read their books about programming in German.


A: So are there like code samples in German?

S: Well I'm not saying you translate the word for in a for loop, or while, but ..

A: Well if we had some other audience I would totally be much more likely to agree with this... If there were car enthusiasts, like we talked about the question last week that was like "What if there was a site for gearheads and people.."

S: I think you're just being unrealistic about the German, Japanese and the Spanish programmers.  I think you're just being unrealistic about how much English they know.  Fine, gearheads, yes I agree.  But I just think you're actually .... and what's...

A: And again, you don't understand, I switched from VB.NET to C# because I got so frustrated because I could never get good code in VB.  I ended up translating everything and over time it just wears you down.  You realize that this is just such a waste of time.  If you wanna do really good code, I couldn't do it in VB even if I wanted to .  There just weren't enough people writing VB, period, for me to be a effective.  If you are a good programmer, you eventually realize that it's inevitable.  You have to. You have to do whatever the majority are doing.

S:  But, you know what?   Apress, my publisher, has taken books that were written in German and translated them into English and published them in the US market. So its not really true, I don't think it's really true that all the good stuff..

A: But somebody complains about the translation, I mean everywhere you go people are like "Ah, the translated stuff is crap!"

S: Yeah, sometimes they are.  It really depends on the language.  And it also depends a little bit on the culture for example, Germans are a lot more fussy about grammar and stuff like that [laughing] than Spanish speakers, and Spanish is aproblem because there are 18 different version of SPanish even though they deny it.  So these things are sort of tricky, they're culturally tricky.  I certainly don't know all the answers to them.  Here's one thing that I found  though that's really interesting.  WHen I was ... all the work I've ever done on localization is if you go to somebody in Germany for example, or Japan, where all the books are in German or Japanese, and you say "Hey, what do you guys think about...Is it ok if I do this in English, or..."  Like I gave a speech in Japan in English and I spoke slowly and clearly and I actually said everything... and in Japan I had a simultaneous translator.  I said a sentence and then the translator translated it, which was tedious but I could tell by when people laughed at the jokes, how many people understood the English.  And how many people didn't.  This is a room of professional developers.  There were 400 professional developers  in Tokyo at the SHoeisha summit, so these are really the elite of Japanese developers and 20% of them maybe understood what I was saying in English.

A: mmmhmm

S: And what was weird though, if you ask any of them they say "Ok just say it in English.  It's ok"  Or if you ask them, if you email them they're like "No, just give it to us in English. It's ok, we know ENglish"  IN other words they are always sort of going to deny, they're always perfectly happy to go along with the official story that English can be the lingua franca of programming.  They're not going to deny that.  They have an inferiority complex about their own language-- that's not really true but they'll sort of deny that, which is where you get into trouble which is where you ask people "Do you wanna localized version, etc, etc"  They tend to say no.  ANd then they'll tell you some story about how they got this localized version that had some bug in it.  Or that the translations were terrible and no one wanted to use it and they just went back to English version, but what they're talking about there is a copy of a version of WIndows where the file menu is a different thing.  And that's very different than a paragraph of text telling you about something, you know, writing a paragraph asking a question, writing a paragraph answering a question is very differnt than just a couple of words in the menu bar.

ALl right, we beat that one to death!



Outro, advertising

Last Modified: 4/16/2009 7:12 PM
